"It was a pretty scary step to share," Muir wrote me in an email, "and I had a bunch of people around me (who) recommended against."

His move to preemptively close restaurants and blog about the decision to do so has certainly turned heads – especially in the restaurant industry. Chefs always talk when one of their own shut down for food sanitation issues – but this time it's different, Boston restaurant consultant Ed Doyle (RealFood Consulting) told me. "Around this it's been a lot of conversation around how they've handled it," he said. "I think the industry has taken note."

Will other restaurants follow Clover's example? Nobody I've talked to knows anyone who's taken transparency quite this far, to date.

More importantly, assuming other chefs won't – and haven't – how many cases of food-borne illness have gone by unnoticed? According to Muir's latest post, there were 1,200 cases of salmonella in Massachusetts last year. The Department of Public Health may not need to harm small businesses by putting every case on blast. But at what point do I have a right to know about organisms that are not on the menu at places where I eat lunch?

Clearly, for Muir, the answer to that question is, "right away." I asked a Department of Public Health spokeswoman this morning whether the state agency had planned to notify the public about the salmonella outbreak at Clover. In Clover's situation, 12 cases have been identified and nobody has been hospitalized. I also asked what the threshold is for public disclosure of incidents like this.

I haven't heard anything back yet, but I'll be sure to post something when I do. I may ask for the DPH records on documented food poisoning outbreaks in Massachusetts, once I get a better picture of how they are stored and published.

None of that will answer a question that is likely worth much more than $20,000 by now to Clover's owners and employees. "As much as I would like certainty," Muir wrote me, "the honest truth is we may never be able to figure out where this started."